A Celebration Of Light

Sudan Tue 27-04-2010

A Celebration Of Light
By Frank Whalley/EastAfrican.co.ke

Photo Credits: Andrew Njoroge/AfricanColours.com

If El Tayib Daw El Bait ever tires of being an artist he should consider becoming a diplomat.

El Tayeb at Le Rustique Because although I am not immediately won over by Sudanese painting, a brief conversation with him convinced me both of his absolute integrity as an artist and of the slowly revealed beauty of what I had previously dismissed as merely tricksy, superficial decoration.

Of course Sudanese paintings shimmer with light — all of them, whether by El Tayeb or others of his countrymen, many of whom have made their home in Nairobi.

It comes from their training at the School of Art and Design in Khartoum where the Muslim rejection of the human figure as a subject fit for mortals leads the students to scrutinise all the possibilities of design, ethnic motifs and calligraphy.

And therein lies another puzzle about El Tayib. Although a Muslim who attaches great value to his faith, he is quite relaxed about including figures in his work. And particularly the nude.

“I am very free in my mind and I respect the beauty of the human being and wish to show it, to celebrate its form and colour,” he told me.

Interestingly, the idea of the human body as the most glorious and noble work of God is precisely the argument advanced by the Christian Church for its ready sponsorship of painters who took figurative art to the pre-eminent level it achieved in the Quattrocento.

Maybe it is the artist’s name that is the best clue to his work... El Tayeb Daw El Bait translates loosely (very loosely) from the Arabic as “The Joy that brings (spiritual) Light to the House.” What a wonderful name — and what a marvellous tribute to any new baby brought into a household.

Now aged 42, El Tayeb (who as a man continues to radiate his pleasure at the gift of life) trained originally as a textile designer in Khartoum, meanwhile developing his interest in fine arts.

Night Nude by El Tayeb

^{Night nude | Mixed media on canvas}

The two overlap to the point that they are inextricable, as can be seen from his paintings, some 14 of which are on show at Le Rustique restaurant, in Nairobi, until May 2.

Generous washes of acrylic, oil or what looks like fabric dye form the base of many of his canvases. On them are occasionally rich passages of thickly applied paint, plus a tender ink line that is frequently employed to describe a nude body or face, and around the central image is layered fabric or a grid of string, subsumed by the paint.

Images are scratched into the scumbled and glazed surface by the wrong end of the brush or any other piece of stick and he recounts with amusement how he sometimes uses a twist of fabric to apply the paint.

For El Tayeb, complete involvement in his pictures is the thing. He uses everything to hand to produce the image he wants.

His subjects are the cycle of life — birth, death, the possibility of rebirth — and often spring from a secret inner world that he attempts to realise through typical Nubian motifs of crocodile, bird, cow horns, palm trees, the patterns found on pottery or drawn on walls... even fragments from facial tattoos.

He keeps adding to the canvas until that moment when he feels the work is complete.

The moon and the stars | Smashed plates on wooden board

To examine a painting by El Tayeb is to enter a mystical world of elusive objects and mythologies, a sifting of ideas, a tapestry of imagery from his ancestry — all seen against that shimmering light.

He draws relentlessly, on matchboxes, tissue boxes and napkins as well as scraps of paper. It is a hangover, he explains, from the time when he was so poor he could not afford sketchpads and scoured city dumps for old cartons, bits of card and boxes. Any surface would do.

These boxes are now sometimes a part of his paintings, usually mounted separately on the wall either below or to the side of his pictures. There are several examples on show at Le Rustique.

It helps to break up the cold distance between viewer and the picture plane, drawing the onlooker forward and into the work.

Faces by El Tayeb

^Faces

Many are beautiful little portraits in their own right. El Tayeb would say self-portraits, although they look nothing like him. But there again, is not art a series of self-portraits, irrespective of the likeness itself?

When not at his easel, in his studio home in Parklands, Nairobi, El Tayeb can be found working as a freelance textile designer for Kiko Romeo, the city fashion house started and run by Ann McCreath.

If you have one of her stylish waistcoats, jackets or dresses, the chances are that you also have on the collar or cuffs your very own El Tayeb — and at fraction of the cost of a painting by this joyful artist who lives for light.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, a fine arts and media consultancy based in Nairobi.
Email: fwhalley@gmail.com

El Tayeb @ Le Rustique

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